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rubel 's review for:
Unfamiliar Fishes
by Sarah Vowell
Sarah Vowell comes across as fairly charming. But in this book, her "pop history" approach winds up feeling a little scatter-shot. Still, for example, her digressions into American and missionary relationships with the Cherokee became more understandable when I realized this book isn't about the Hawaiian people. It's about the missionaries who traveled to the islands, what they did there, and how they prepared the islands culturally and politically for annexation. She also argues that the annexation was in character with the US's previous expansion into North America and 1898 widespread power consolidation as spoils of the Spanish-American War (the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba--or at least Guantanamo Bay).
She tries to portray the missionaries as both an incursion of cultural xenophobes and simultaneously as true believers who cared about the well-being of the Hawaiians. As an aspiring educator, I was fascinated to learn how the missionaries learned to speak Hawaiian, devised a system for writing it down, and taught Hawaiians to read--reaching a 75% literacy level in two generations, outdistancing the US's reading ability. Of course, this was all in service of getting printing presses working putting out Hawaiian translations of the Bible (done by eight ministers over 15 years, directly from the Hebrew...amazing!) I didn't think I could find missionaries sympathetic, but I sort of did by the end.
So I learned a lot more details of people and places (stuff I'd carefully ignored in middle school), and there's a lengthy bibliography in the back. Although it did not satisfy me as much as I'd like, it did leave me hungry for more history about our islands. It's a quick and easy read, and I hope it inspires others to dig in and understand more.
She tries to portray the missionaries as both an incursion of cultural xenophobes and simultaneously as true believers who cared about the well-being of the Hawaiians. As an aspiring educator, I was fascinated to learn how the missionaries learned to speak Hawaiian, devised a system for writing it down, and taught Hawaiians to read--reaching a 75% literacy level in two generations, outdistancing the US's reading ability. Of course, this was all in service of getting printing presses working putting out Hawaiian translations of the Bible (done by eight ministers over 15 years, directly from the Hebrew...amazing!) I didn't think I could find missionaries sympathetic, but I sort of did by the end.
So I learned a lot more details of people and places (stuff I'd carefully ignored in middle school), and there's a lengthy bibliography in the back. Although it did not satisfy me as much as I'd like, it did leave me hungry for more history about our islands. It's a quick and easy read, and I hope it inspires others to dig in and understand more.